Olive 8 and Fifth & Madison Update

The Seattle Times covered the Olive 8 auction last weekend. According to David Thyer, president of developer R.C. Hedreen, all but 4 homes (out of the 32 auction homes) were accepted by the seller last Sunday.

"Before Sunday, Olive 8 closed deals for 74 of its 227 units, mostly on the building's lower portion between floors 18 and 26. The 32 units auctioned off Sunday represent nearly all of the unsold inventory on that lower portion, so "we'll no longer have prospective buyers going through those floors," Thyer said last week. Olive 8 still has a little more than 100 unsold units on the top floors, with price tags from $500,000 to $6.9 million."

This made me wonder if all the Fifth and Madison auctioned homes actually reached the closing table. I managed to pull some information and put together this updated sheet. Out of the 16 auction homes, 13 closed within 60 days. The three homes (#1102, #1200 & #1805) that went back on the market after the auction were subsequently closed within the next five months (presumably, not to bidders). Out of the 13 homes that closed within 60 days, a few of them were sold at a higher price. They are #1803, #2200, and #2202. The average closed price is still about 66% of the original listing price. So, in Fifth and Madison's case, they managed to close ~81% of their auction homes, not a bad way to unload a big chunk of unsold inventory in a day.